Our work

For the past one and a half years we have worked with about 150 patients over short and long periods of time. Most of our work has been with students and teachers and non-teaching staff who belong to Ambedkar University and other student populations nearby. The psychotherapeutic work with students involves a link between their academic performance and their internal lives which are affected by the multiple social locations they occupy, dynamics within their families and the relationships around them. Some of our effort has also gone into working with children who have been referred from schools and who suffer from intense experiences of rage, maladjustment in the class room and an inability to cope with their academic work.

Thus, patients have come to ehsaas with difficulties ranging from anxiety, depression and suicidality to gender dysporia, body image issues, and behavioural problems. In addition to this, many individuals came to Ehsaas with adjustment difficulties, associability, drug addiction, loss of a loved one or intractable family issues such as domestic violence, alcoholism or psychosis of a family member, broken homes, sexual abuse or difficulty in sustaining relationships.

Even as many patients come to Ehsaas with emotional distress, deep anxiety about the symptom and need to return to a world of ‘functional’ selves, it is empathy for the symptom and care for the exiled parts of one’s self that augment a change.